Author
Topic: How to Rotate Photos (Read 14061 times)

Hi, I uploaded a couple of photos which are upright on my computer, yet when displayed on the forum are rotated to the left. Is there any way of changing this or doing something that stops it. I did try uploading a photo that was rotated to the left to see if it would change to being upright, but it loaded in the same orientation. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Alli, this happens because the software you are using on your computer doesn't really rotate the image. Instead it only "shows you" a rotated image. My first guess is that you are using a Mac, but it is possible that some Windows programs could be doing this too.

This auto-rotate feature is a pet-peeve of mine, because it misleads the person into believing that the picture will be oriented properly when they share a photo with another person using a different computer (or posting to a website). The software thinks it is helping you by auto-rotating the image you see on the screen, but unfortunately it leads many users into believing that it was actually rotating the source image.

I don't know if you can override this feature or not, but if not, then you will have to use a photo editing program that actually performs a true image rotation.

If you have a pc you can simply use Windows Photo Viewer to rotate images. It's the default viewer for images after you've installed Windows. It has a very small toolbar with just a couple of buttons on it, and 2 of them are to rotate the image left and right. I am very familiar with Photoshop but for simple rotations I mostly use Windows Photo Viewer because it is faster.

If you want an image viewer with more capabilities you can download the freeware program Irfanview. This program can do a lot and is one of the best image viewers/editors out there.